Within a couple hours of tweeting about former NBA star Kobe Bryant's rape allegation, Julie Lalonde had received thousands of replies—many of them advising her to kill herself, or that she deserved to be raped.
Lalonde, an Ottawa-based women's rights advocate, was reacting to news of Bryant's death by helicopter crash when she tweeted "Kobe Bryant was a rapist. In case y'all forget that over the next few days."
Bryant later settled with his accuser in a separate civil suit. In a public statement, he apologized to her and said he understood she did not consider the sex consensual.
"For me, it was important to just sort of remind progressives that while you're fawning over your favourite basketball star, women are watching that and thinking 'OK, you don't care that he did this heinous thing.'"
Washington Post politics reporter Felicia Sonmez has been suspended from her job after she tweeted a link to a 2016 Daily Beast article about the alleged sexual assault.
"Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality even if that public figure is beloved and that totality unsettling," she tweeted.
Toronto Star sports columnist Bruce Arthur also caught some heat for discussing Bryant's rape case during a panel on Canadian sports network TSN Sunday. However, he notes the vitriol is nothing compared to what women like Lalonde and Sonmez are dealing with.
"It was a huge part of his career, of his legacy, of his life," said Arthur. "Kobe said specifically that after the Colorado case, he changed the way he decided to be, he decided to be a more authentic person."
The angry reaction to discussing the case isn't surprising to Arthur. With sports, as with politics, he said people tend to cheer for their teams and their heroes, sometimes abandoning reason and perspective in the process.
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